I decided to push a little at work today. I was talked to last month about the possibility of shifting to working during the night and, to be honest, I was thrilled. Work and school conflicts have been a growing problem in my life and these night hours were the perfect solution. I kept hoping to hear more but, with everything else going on, it seems to have slipped off the radar.
Hopefully, I put it back om the radar today. I start a fairly important class on th 22nd and I need my work schedule shifted before then. I’m not sure what to do if it is denied. Honestly, I am just hoping that doesn’t happen.
With all the chaos, it’s been easy to get distracted and my work has suffered for it. That changes now. It just has too. I sat down last night and realized that there was too much as risk to let myself stay distracted. I love doing this. I love sharing and telling tales. I always have. Now is not the time to get distracted.
There is a sort of pleasant melancholy that can be found in living in our own past. The trials and tribulations of earlier times become the myth and legend of our present. We can see, in perfect clarity, how our successes and failures each carried some great lesson or moral that expanded our understanding and changed who we were because of it. These memories become our fables. They create the story of who we are and in so doing they take on the air of something sacred.
There are few who can express this better than Garrison Keillor. Indeed, his career exists because of his ability to make the past seem like a wonderful and idyllic place. I can still remember tuning in to hear his tales of Lake Wobegon on the local radio station in Minneapolis when I was young. He is, in that sense, a part of my own mythos. He showed me that there is great beauty in memory and in those bygone golden eras that seem all the more golden as time travels on.
Because of this, I can’t say that I was surprised by Keillor’s Op-Ed in the New York Times. It can be hard to watch the world change and when you live to treasure the past it becomes easy to only see poverty in the present. The Old Era of publishing is fading. The models are changing. Even those with only a cursory understanding of publishing know that. We now live in a time where anyone can become both an author and a publisher and Keillor is so very right when he notes that most of those who choose such a course will earn almost nothing. Most will fail and their work will swirl in the electronic tide until it is lost on hard drives and deleted from memory. Of course, some form of this has always been true whether the story was written by hand, typed out on an aging typewriter or developed on the modern computer. Failure is part of being an author.
It is in that failure that the martyrdom that Keillor mourns still remains. Even an author in Keillor’s “Old Era” chose to stay. They chose to write and submit. They chose to face rejection after rejection and they still carried on. The difference today is only in the type of work an author must do. That stubborn spirit is still a requirement. That dedication and effort is still part and parcel with the character of being an author and, because of that, new mythologies of authorship and storytelling will rise and fall just as they always have. Storytellers tends to be remarkably adaptive individuals.
Perhaps, Keillor’s elite will suffer a blow; although, I tend to find that the wealthy seem quite adept at staying wealthy. Perhaps, his parties with young women in black dresses will be replaced by something else. Those things may happen, and yet I find that I don’t care so much about those things. I care about the words and the works. Yes, we are like “hummingbirds in an endless meadow of flowers” but, like hummingbirds, we still seek the flowers with the best nectar. It is they that will likely grab the most attention. That doesn’t mean we won’t miss a few treasures here or there but at least the flowers can be planted and given a chance to grow.
Make no mistake, I’m quite sure the “Old Era” was beautiful for those who made it past the iron doors. The aristocracy always tends to mourn when the masses get access to what once was theirs alone. As much as Keillor may protest with his car of 150,000 miles (happily parked near his extravagant 1914 Georgian house in one of the most expensive areas of St. Paul), he is part that aristocracy. He slipped in past the doors and he was ecstatic. Now those doors are gone and the methods have changed. A new world has arisen filled with challenges and opportunities that will press us to the limit. Feel free to pause and mourn the mythology of what once and never was. Then, look forward to a wide plethora of new creative opportunities some of which we still have yet to imagine.
